Oh hi there. Long time no see. Apparently I haven’t posted since February 2017, huh. A lot of things have happened in the meantime, it turns out. Some of those things are to blame for my general inactivity elsewhere, but when it comes to this blog I just can’t seem to come up with anything to say worthy of my trademark text walls, at least not ever since I joined Twitter several years ago— wait, wasn’t that in 2010? Time sure flies. I feel old. Okay, let’s face it, I am old.

“Iris” version 1.1.0 as of earlier today

In addition to it having been a while since my last post in here, it has also been a while since the last time I gave the website an overhaul, for what little use it sees nowadays. Because of that, plus some of my experiences designing the new website theme for The Battle for Wesnoth last year, I decided to try to modernize my own a little bit so it looks more in tune with my current practices. I also decided to spruce things up with a new colour scheme, like last time, taking things in a different direction to what I’m used to.

An attentive reader who’s been around for long enough might be able to tell that the “Iris” design last year did undergo a slight revision incorporating Font Awesome in order to make icons not look awful on high-DPI screens. This was a natural conclusion of my work designing and testing the Wesnoth.org theme on devices with higher pixel density. Plus it was precisely last year that I actually caved in and got a smartphone given to me by a relative, further highlighting all the inconveniences of designing things on/for 96 DPI these days. Other than that, though, the design remained mostly unchanged from what I made in 2014.

“Iris” version 1.2.0, aptly codenamed Amethyst for reasons that should be blatantly obvious, is mostly the same as before under the hood, but on the surface it hopefully looks shinier and more elegant and modern. Even though I am not using the site much right now like I mentioned above, I have a faint hope that the new look will motivate me to post more again.

Since there wasn’t a New Year post last year, or even the year before that, or uh... the year before that as well... actually I guess there haven’t been New Year posts in here since January 1st 2013. Oops. Anyway, I guess it’s time for a short summary of what I have been up to in recent times. Let’s see...

Nearly 11 years ago, I was checking out some of the free and open-source games included with the openSUSE distribution when I came across a fantasy turn-based strategy game called Wesnoth. I vaguely remember taking a quick look at it and dismissing it for some reason. It wasn’t until an OS update later the same year that I would actually give version 0.9.5 a proper try. Immediately upon doing so, I was enthralled by the game’s sheer quality and its surprisingly accessible gameplay.

During the first quarter of 2006, I started toying around with WML and the map editor, and put together three or four semi-playable campaigns rife with awful prose and flat characters just for fun. At the time, the possibility of publishing my content online for others to play it didn’t even cross my mind — and frankly, it’s for the best that it didn’t. Much later that year, though, I decided to join the forums and actively interact with the community. The next year I started to seriously think about giving back to this community, as a way of saying “thank you” to the countless people — developers, artists, musicians, translators, and players — who invested their time and energy into this project.

It would be a big understatement to say that joining the Wesnoth development team became a turning point for me, personally. But that is far from the only experience that changed my perception of open-source software and people in general. Looking back on it, making a campaign comprising 30-odd scenarios, all to give a rejected Elvish Shyde replacement sprite a practical purpose, was an incredibly ambitious idea and I probably wouldn’t have attempted anything like that a year later, and certainly not now. But it’s a thing I did, and a lot of people seemed to like the result despite the generous borrowing of elements from other campaigns — mostly mainline — so I decided to keep maintaining it, and even started to work on a sequel after a while.

That epic-length campaign was originally codenamed “Armageddon”, but for production purposes I went with a longer, albeit less sophisticated name: “Invasion from the Unknown”. I asked around for better name ideas, but nobody answered that call, so the name stuck. Its sequel was codenamed and later properly titled “After the Storm”.

IftU changed a lot during its early days. Scenarios were moved around, renamed, rewritten, and characters introduced or redesigned as I saw fit. In particular, working on AtS throughout 2008 and 2009 and preparing for a prospective addition of IftU to mainline brought in more profound changes to the story line, partly to accommodate some future plot points better. But I also began to view this campaign in a critical light. Various changes in my life helped exacerbate my negative opinion of IftU, and this eventually spilled over to AtS as well, resulting in approximately two years of creative block.

Finally, at some point mid-2011, I snapped out of that mindset and decided to embrace some of IftU’s less favorable qualities and complete AtS and its sequel — which eventually became AtS episode III — but I also decided to improve and rework what I could as soon as I had the chance. After releasing the completed AtS 0.9.0 in Q1 2013, my work on codename “Reconstruction” began. I was finally free to do as I wished with IftU, and make the campaign that I tried to make in 2007, except without the broken grammar, malapropisms, awkward dialogue structure, close-to-nonexistent characterization, and unmaintainable program code. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, everything.

It’s pretty clear to anyone who’s been following Wesnoth up close that things aren’t what they used to be back in 2007. Interests and demographics have changed, and IftU and AtS have been hit hard by these trends. People these days are more interested in complete products than in actively participating in the development process. There is an overabundance of long campaigns and very little time to play them. Wesnoth’s audience overall is also shrinking and engaging less with content creators, which further compounds the problem and isn’t a huge motivation in general. And even though I wasn’t alone on it, maintaining core Wesnoth — especially during my tenure as Release Manager during 2015 — sucked up pretty much all of my time and energy, leaving me barely able to spend perhaps a couple of days a month on Reconstruction. But after coming across a person who actually valued IftU and AtS for what they are, I managed to focus again and eventually start releasing the Reconstruction release candidates throughout late Q4 2015. All that was supposed to culminate in a 2.0.0 release on December 24th, but a lot of unexpected things happened during December so I had to hold that plan off for a while. And now we’re here.

I’d like to think that my 2007 self (and especially my 2006 self) would have played the Reconstruction version of IftU right after finishing UtBS, and thoroughly enjoyed every single minute of it — even if he didn’t really have the experience needed to discern bad prose from acceptable prose, or code, for that matter. Maybe it’s not the best campaign ever, and maybe it fills a niche that no longer exists, but it’s a thing I made and I think that’s important in some intangible fashion. I created, therefore, I am. I don’t know.

Version 2.0.0 is by no means intended to be the final update to IftU, and I have a few ideas brewing for version 2.1.0 already. It probably won’t happen until AtS 0.10.0 is out, however, and that’s going to take me at least another month due to recent incidents beyond my control that have been keeping me from working on it. Yep, it keeps happening.

I’d like to thank vultraz, nemaara, and pydsigner/pyndragon for their invaluable input, assistance, and moral support throughout Reconstruction’s development (especially the second half); Espreon, AI0867, and Alarantalara for maintaining the previous incarnation of IftU on my behalf while I was fully preoccupied with AtS development; Kitty, Loonycyborg, Mica, Mist, and Mythological, for helping with IftU during the Wesnoth 1.3.x and 1.5.x times; and my beloved companion who stuck beside me all these years and helped me through rough times and put up with me until his departure in February this year. This release is dedicated to all of you, and to the Wesnoth community as a whole.

There is nothing noteworthy about AtS 0.9.16 whatsoever, but IftU 1.99.0 constitutes the first public codename Reconstruction release after several years of work. That is, not counting this year’s April 1st release (which apparently everyone simply assumed to be a hoax instead of actually downloading it from the trunk add-ons server).

I’m cutting this post short since — as should be painfully evident — I don’t really feel motivated to update this blog nowadays. Still, the announcement over at the Wesnoth forums has some more details about this first IftU 1.99.x/2.0 RC series release that are worth checking out if you are planning on installing or updating to this new version.

Due to circumstances, it has been quite a while, and honestly I lost track of what this release was supposed to have besides a thing that requires another thing from another campaign that has not been completed or released yet. So let’s talk about what AtS 0.9.10 actually has.

Firstly, the minimum Wesnoth version requirement now is 1.11.11.

That’s right. Previous versions (including 1.10.x) are no longer supported. Ever since I moved to 1.11.x following the release of AtS 0.9.0, maintaining support for previous versions (including buggy development releases) required a series of unwieldy kludges that made the code uglier and harder to maintain and were, for the most part, untested beyond the classic “does it compile?” test. With all those bits gone, it will be easier to improve and optimize some aspects of the campaign, as well as work on the thing that requires the other thing I alluded to above.

For now, the first one such aspect I have worked on is converting several units to the 1.11.x animation WML syntax. Although some other people seem to prefer the new syntax over everything, I have chosen a more pragmatic approach for this campaign, so the set of units that I’ve converted in this release is rather limited. Hopefully more will follow soon, but I’m certain that there are a few for which the change hurts code readability. Plus, since most of my units are headbutters, the code size gains are marginal in the average case.

Finally, somebody reported to me of an issue with the player’s recall list and gold being discarded during certain key scenario transitions. It turns out this resulted from a change in Wesnoth 1.11.13 purportedly intended as a bug fix for MP campaigns. I was aware of the change and its implications at the time 1.11.13 was released, but I wrongly assumed AtS would not be impacted because I failed to take a tiny detail into account. Exactly three months later, I realized the sheer gravity of my mistake — but fortunately, it seems nobody else played AtS on 1.11.13+ in the meantime. (Thanks to RainerT for the report. This would have gone unnoticed for who knows how many more years months otherwise.)

As you can see, there is not a lot to talk about in this release other than the version requirement change. Since it’ll be a while before Wesnoth 1.12.0 is released, and AtS remains largely the same as it was the last time I posted in this topic, I believe stable version purists won’t be missing out on anything for now — at least not until the thing is done.

Also due to circumstances, this release is largely untested, so I would not be surprised if I accidentally broke a thing or two since 0.9.9.

Since I have tested and developed this campaign primarily on Wesnoth 1.11.x since the 0.9.0 release, this version promotes support for Wesnoth 1.11.8 to official status. Because most of the campaign makes use of 1.11.x-specific features (both from me and other mainline developers) when available, it is quite possible that I will entirely drop support for Wesnoth 1.10.x in a future release even before the first Wesnoth 1.12 beta arrives. I still intend to make sure certain additions and changes for episodes II and III land before the last AtS version supporting 1.10.x, if time permits.

This 0.9.9 release primarily deals with prose corrections and improvements, and various other ‘cosmetic’ changes. There are also various fixes for some instances of dysfunctional AI recruitment on Wesnoth 1.11.7 and 1.11.8 resulting from the recruitment_save_gold aspect being enabled by default in those versions (but not 1.11.9 and later).

There isn’t much in terms of new graphics since the prose and code changes (plus some mainline stuff) have kept me far too busy to do much more than some doodles. On the other hand, this release contains various animation fixes and improvements to the Aragwaithi units ported from Era of Chaos. There are also a handful of balancing changes affecting both Aragwaith and non-Aragwaith units.

Also featuring in this release are a number of WML optimizations intended to reduce campaign load times — especially on 1.10.x, which has a slightly slower tokenizer implementation than 1.11.x. Since the affected bits of code have been completely rewritten in Lua, it is possible that I accidentally introduced new bugs in the process that I may have missed during my playthrough, extensive as it was.

There is also a new secret feature that is not mentioned in the changelog. What is it, you ask? Well, if I told you, that would ruin the surprise. Think of it as a Christmas present!

Finally, from this release onwards, After the Storm is no longer part of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project, and will be hosted on GitHub instead. Ever since development of the campaign started, Wesnoth-UMC-Dev provided SVN repository hosting for both After the Storm and Invasion from the Unknown, but over time that has proved to be an inefficient solution due to technical and organizational concerns. Although the conversion process was not easy in the least, I believe that this move will make things easier for me in the long-term, since I had been using git-svn to work on IftU and AtS since late 2008 anyway.

Release tarballs will continue to be hosted by Wesnoth-UMC-Dev for the time being, until I decide to phase them out entirely in favor of GitHub’s Releases page. If anyone is using them because they cannot normally download AtS or AtS_Music from the wesnoth.org add-ons server, I’d appreciate it if you let me know so I can make a more informed decision in the future (or point you to add-ons.wesnoth.org, that works too). For the time being, the tarball compression format has changed from Bzip2 (.tar.bz2) to xz (.tar.xz).

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Special thanks to vultraz and 8680 for their proofreading assistance, without which this release would be about 1% less awesome. Also thanks to the current and past Wesnoth-UMC-Dev admins, AI/AI0867 and Espreon, for their continued support all these years — IftU and AtS simply wouldn’t be the same without Wesnoth-UMC-Dev.

For very long, there have been only two (2) campaigns in the Wesnoth add-ons server that follow the “shadowmcanon” established by Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm; the campaigns in question are Invasion from the Unknown, and After the Storm. Yes. That’s it. The only other campaign whose author has consulted plot matters with me and followed the shadowmcanon correctly (as opposed to blindly extrapolating from IftU and AtS and making grossly wrong assumptions about things that are left unspecified or presented in a deliberately vague fashion) is The Silver Lands, but it was abandoned far too early during its development cycle.

But the status quo has just changed with the release of version 0.5.0 of Shadows of Deception (NX-RPG), a campaign by vultraz for Wesnoth 1.11.6 and later. So far, six scenarios out of the first set of 12 have been done; the goal is two episodes.

Of note is the fact that vultraz has been a member of my After the Storm internal playtesting and prose reviewing team for a couple of years.

Per the description found in the campaign’s forum thread, Shadows of Deception (SoD for short) is “a half-RPG, half regular style Wesnoth campaign, incorporating several custom gameplay elements as well as your typical battle scenarios”. What does half-RPG mean? Damn if I know — I don't even know what a full RPG would be. Having playtested SoD prior to the release myself, though, I can say that the campaign places a fair amount of emphasis on the story while experimenting with some unusual gameplay mechanics.

The story

The protagonists of this campaign are the elvish enchantress Niryone, and her apprentice Elynia. If you have played IftU or AtS, you are definitely familiarized with Elynia’s game-breaking abilities and power. You will not find any of that here. SoD is a distant prequel that takes place during her apprenticeship days circa 1081 YW, back when she was far even more useless younger and entirely ignorant of the sequence of events that would lead to Wesnoth’s political reorganization and changes echoing throughout all of the Great Continent. Thus, the real protagonist for most of SoD Episode I is her adoptive mother and mentor Niryone, whose existence was repeatedly alluded to throughout AtS.

The story is derived from Late History: Irdya before the Fall in the wiki (full of SPOILERS, in case it isn’t obvious), which I originally wrote back in 2008 (and revised some months ago) along with the rest of Future History in order to provide additional backstory for some IftU characters (e.g. Elynia, Argan) and events (e.g. the Fall). But what I wrote back then was not quite the story narrated by SoD; my text was essentially limited to an overall outline enumerating major events and characters in the broader context of Irdya. All characters and events in SoD are written according to vultraz’s own interpretation of the outline, with some input from 8680, Zerovirus, and me. In that regard, for characters other than Elynia’s younger self, I have only provided very rough characterization guidelines without going into details that could constrain the creative process too much. Elynia’s interpretation is purely vultraz’s, and so far I’d say he has nailed her character.

Without going into too much detail about the plot, I think that it features some unique ideas that I haven’t seen used a lot in any mainline campaigns — or IftU and AtS, for that matter. The great thing about the campaign is that it stands on its own as a product, and you don’t need to play any other campaigns to understand what’s going on. Of course, knowing some mainline lore always helps when it comes to identifying locations such as Wesnoth and Elensefar, but in the worst case you’ve got a massive map of the “mainline region” of the Great Continent in the game’s titlescreen.

The gameplay

To elaborate upon my previous statement about SoD’s design, resources throughout the campaign are rather limited, thus you won’t be building a massive army like those seen in Northern Rebirth or classic IftU — unless your intention is to repeatedly run into inconvenient negative budget situations. Au contraire, your focus should be on managing as few units as possible and utilizing the spells mechanic with your two leads. Disappointingly, this first release of the campaign only implements one (1) spell for Niryone, and a secret spell hidden somewhere decidedly secret. Your starting spell, however, should be quite useful to get your units out of sticky situations; in fact, it can be so useful, it borders on being a game-breaking mechanic, an issue which should hopefully be corrected in upcoming releases along with the overall lack of spells. On the plus side, this is better connected to the story than your typical Wesnoth UMC gameplay gimmick, as illustrated soon enough during the first few scenarios. The same can be said for the inventory mechanic; it is not particularly useful due to the current items shortage, but it does come into play for advancing the storyline at one point so far.

Perhaps more important than how often these features are used throughout the campaign in its current state, is the fact that the author has clearly put a lot of thought and effort into them. Both make use of custom Lua-based GUI2 dialogs, a Wesnoth engine feature that is very poorly documented and quite sadly underrated, even by the GUI2 developer himself. The UI design done for the sake of these two gameplay aspects alone makes the campaign fit seamlessly within Wesnoth’s framework, a courageous feat to behold and respect given GUI2’s status as an undermaintained and eternally moving target. That said, much like AtS’ (very sparse) usage of the GUI2 Lua bindings, it is quite probable that this kind of thing will break for users on display resolutions lower than the minimum supported by mainline, which is 800x480 absolute (not Retina) pixels. For now this isn’t a problem, since there are no unofficial ports of 1.11.x to mobile devices, and maybe by the point Wesnoth 1.12 is out everyone will be on devices with 8K full-HD or whatever. Yes, that’s a hyperbolic statement about 1.12’s unending development cycle, in case you could not tell.

Visuals, units, et cetera

Map design in SoD is generally good, portraying lush detailed environments from the Great Continent as it was during the mainline epoch, as opposed to the ruined wastelands seen so often in IftU or AtS. However, they are interspersed with underground scenarios, which may be somewhat of a letdown for those who dread dungeon crawling-style gameplay in the style of the aforementioned campaigns. To make up for it, SoD also features varied recruits and new enemy units to break the constant destroy-all-undead-and-kill-all-orcs cliché seen in so many, many other campaigns.

The art for the two protagonists was provided by some random nobody, who I have heard was basically forced by vultraz to make sprites within exceedingly restrictive schedules to the point that he or she had to sacrifice quality for the sake of getting a releasable product in time. I have also heard that this situation has become kind of a chronic issue for that person.

Some of the new unit art that features in later scenarios was provided by everyone’s favorite prolific pixel artist, Zerovirus. I am fairly sure Zerovirus fans will be able to spot his art as soon as it begins appearing on the game map, but it’s important to note that some of the art was actually created or edited by vultraz as well.

Other than these few points, there is not much else to talk about regarding SoD’s art development. Much like AtS, which was started and finished with a budget of exactly $0.00, portrait art for original characters is completely absent in this campaign. Nothing that can be helped in the short term, given that the author doesn’t work with portrait artists at this time, and seriously, good portrait artists generally don’t have much time to spare and would only be willing to contribute under commission, reasonably so.

To conclude

Shadows of Deception is a bold attempt by vultraz to develop a product that can join the shadowmcanon (IftU and AtS) while working as its own campaign without requiring the player to be familiarized with the rest. It is an early work in progress with only six scenarios complete out of 12 for the first episode, but it already shows a huge amount of dedication on part of the author in all areas that make up a good Wesnoth campaign: art, story, map design, you name it. Some of the new gameplay aspects introduced aren’t used as much as they should probably be to make them enticing to newcomers, but this situation may change as time passes and player feedback is provided. Because, you are obviously going to provide the author with that precious feedback while the add-on is being developed, right?

I think it is a promising campaign. I for one am eagerly looking forward to playing the rest, assuming it doesn’t get abandoned like the aforementioned case of TSL. That would make me sad. And nobody wants to see a sad shadowm.

As far as I know, no more fixes are required, which is good, for I do not expect any more AtS releases for a while.

I do not expect any more AtS releases for a while.

LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES

NEVER doing this again.

The complete changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.9.7:
--------------
* Scenarios:
* E3S10 - Blood:
* Fixed an oversight in the implementation of the [hidden_unit] WML action
that could cause an event to destroy the player units forever by
clobbering them with enemy units at the start of the second stage.
* Units:
* Removed compatibility code introduced in version 0.9.4 to handle the
'fairy'->'faerie' race id transition done in that same release. Saved games
from 0.9.3 and older versions may not be used from now on.

Some people in the audience might have heard of a certain revamp taking place a little while ago in the multiplayer Era of Chaos add-on. In fact, this effort was originally started by artisticdude for AtS; he did the basic Demon units (Demon, Demon Grunt, Demon Warrior, Demon Zephyr), which received some touch-ups from me, and then I proceeded to redraw their cousins from scratch in record time. The differences compared to the old baseframes might seem jarring at first, but I can confirm that the original oversized sprites used in IftU and AtS all these years were merely an oversight and not something I actually did on purpose.

This release mostly revolves around graphic updates for the aforementioned unit type groups, compatibility fixes and improvements for the upcoming Wesnoth 1.11.6 (whenever it’s ready), and a catastrophic bug in Episode III scenario 6 (Divergence). Additionally, a unit type was renamed, breaking non-start-of-scenario saved games for the only scenario in which it appears; some unit type descriptions for the in-game help were rewritten, expanded upon, or added for the first time (“FIXME” never counted as a description), and a few unimportant inconsistencies were solved. Not listed in the changelog are a few minor dialogue additions to the last segment of Episode III scenario 10 (Blood).

For those who can afford the 7.32 MiB download, I strongly advise upgrading now instead of continuing to use older versions. Aside from the aforementioned renaming and the scenario it affects, nothing will break. Also note that this is the last version that will accept old saved games from version 0.9.3 and earlier. The faerie race renaming support code will be gone in version 0.9.7.

Well, the cat’s out of the bag already. Not that I really intended to keep the plan under wraps for very long in the first place—perhaps I should have done that—but I already implied, and then confirmed that this is a thing that is taking place.

Invasion from the Unknown is being rewritten.

Those who have stuck around for long enough may know that IftU’s prose has been revised before by ESR (up to scenario 6 or maybe 9, my memory’s hazy on this one) and later by SouthernOracle (entire campaign). None of these efforts went deeper than the language layer, and even then there is still a lot left to be desired in that department. I have also repeatedly redesigned and rewritten scenario 4 (“Over the Sands”) from scratch over the years.

During the production of After the Storm I realized and learned many things about my past and current work. A sizable amount of AtS’ development consisted of deciding exactly how much of IftU works and how much does not, either in execution or essence. Even after I gave up on perfectionism for AtS, I could not help but think that making such an absurdly ambitious sequel to such a very, very poorly done campaign was an absolutely preposterous waste of time. And I still think that is the case, and there is nothing I can really do to remedy the situation for people who have already played IftU and who will always remember it as the chaotic mess of half-baked ideas and shallow characters it currently is.

But I believe I can do better for future players.

The thought of ‘remaking’ IftU had been in my mind for years, but I always knew I would never find the right person with the interest in taking up such a colossal and largely unrewarding task while ensuring the end result would be just as I envisioned it. But… I also thought I would never see After the Storm complete with its two planned episodes and the—originally intended to be a separate sequel—final episode wrapping it up for good. AtS’ completion—regardless of how bad or good the results are—gives me a certain confidence that I am able to see a project through, even if that may involve a few a lot of unexpected turns along the way.

While the few people who actually like the ‘classic’ IftU might be inclined to assume the campaign’s overall tone will change for the worse (AtSification, anyone?), I don’t intend that to be the case and that would actually break AtS itself as the experiment in style it is intended to be. I do intend to add some of the characterization that is entirely missing in the current product, but not to the point of boring anyone to death with it — well, anyone who would play Excruciatingly Frequent and Extensive Walls of Text: The Campaign anyway. At the same time, some backstory elements and plot will be revised to allow some things to make more sense than they do at the moment. Scenario 4 will be rewritten from scratch once again in an effort to make it less tedious and more coherent. One or two scenarios may be axed in order to help with balancing and pacing issues currently resulting from the campaign’s length. Mal Keshar will be replaced with a talking animal and Anlindë will be spared from scenario 13!

At the same time, the terrible codebase is being replaced with some more polished WML and Lua from AtS, and rewritten to take advantage of features that have only appeared in Wesnoth 1.9.x and 1.11.x — bear in mind that IftU was written in 2007 (Wesnoth 1.3.x) and most code has only been ported to run on newer versions within restrictive time constraints, without much regard for style or robustness.

All in all, I believe that this will allow me to keep some ideas fresh in my mind while continuing to exercise some skills for the benefit of both IftU and AtS. How long is this going to take? Less than AtS, certainlyhopefully, but far more than it took me to complete IftU in the first place. My workflow requires me to go through the scenario sequence in an orderly, linear fashion, and I am only at scenario 7 after commencing this endeavor only about two months ago; and of course, my time is constrained by some sprite artwork that needs to be done or redone for both campaigns.

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Now, the question nobody asked and nobody with a fully-functional brain should ever care about: How is this affecting the development of a sequel to After the Storm?

Simply put, it isn’t.

To be more specific, I do not intend to start working on a sequel to AtS right away given the poor/nil reception it has had as of this writing. And even if it were my intention to work on it in the immediate future, there would be tons of work to be done for it that currently fall far beyond my skills in terms of game design and artwork. I really want to avoid repeating the same mistake I did with AtS and tie this sequel to a previous iteration of limited scope and impact. Instead, I want it to be able to stand on its own and attract people who have never/will never play IftU or AtS; and I have a few ideas to achieve that, but nothing concrete or affordable as of yet. Will it ever see the light of day? Only time will tell.